


Blue feathers on the window

by Spylace



Category: Strike Back
Genre: Gen, and others - Freeform, but mostly - Freeform, wrecking family trees, yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damien Scott and Colonel Grant, before Project Dawn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue feathers on the window

**Author's Note:**

> There’s your standard commercialized holiday like Christmas, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day. Then there are just days that exist solely to make your life utter hell. I mean, White Day? Rose Day??? In defiance of such capitalistic customs, I humbly add this tiny story to the small but much cherished section of Strike Back.

Damien Scott at twelve months is Damien Grant, a gap-toothed little boy with a penchant putting his entire fist in his mouth with whatever unfortunate item that happens to be clutched between his chubby fingers. Eleanor Grant frowns, her lips pressed into a straight line, as he stares up at her in beatific adoration. “Go on” her sister says, standing beside her. “He won’t bite.”

She knows that dammit—she was the one who gave birth to him screaming out loud and cursing her then beau James McAlonan with whom she thought she would be with forever. But he dies in conflict, the first in line against the Irish Republican Army. The grief turned her stomach sour and Damien was born screaming his tiny lungs out. She too cried in bitterness at his appearance, wrinkled and shriveled like a gremlin sent to torment.

It doesn’t matter that she was going to get married and have a life together with him. She turns her face away, burying her tears in the wind.

+++

Dead fiancé or not, as an unmarried girl with a child at her hips, she is branded a scarlet woman. She cannot manage the doe-eyed affection her sister radiates at her son’s presence. He is too different from her, dark-haired with the barest hint of green emerging from his baby blues. She feels like a failure when his face crumples, spotted red, wailing for a toy which has fallen in the wayside.

Her sister coos, her carbon copy down to the last freckle but different in every which way. It’s a closed book adoption. Her parents are inexorably furious.  But they don’t understand, she doesn’t care if her sister and her husband had been willing. It would have been unbearable, too much of a temptation to have Damien so far yet so close. She could have never let him go.

The one last photo she has of him is with his family. His _new_ family. She memorizes his face, the round cheeks and the way his dark curls have been cut and parted neatly at the sides. He looks healthy and most of all happy, which is more than she could have ever provided on her own.

Sometimes she wonders what it could have been like had she been selfish enough to keep him.

+++

From that point on, her life is an endless climb. Eleanor is in the army intelligence, she works too much, never visits for the holidays, her parents’ disappointment too bitter for her to bear. She punches through the ranks; she has a few flings but none that ever lasts. A file lands on her desk in 2003 and she can’t stop staring.

She has men in the Middle East, assessing ground-zero of the most colossal fuckup of the century. Too many are involved already, grunts, foot soldiers who won’t know their ass from their front even when drawn a map with a gold star stamped on top.

But on the other side of the line, there are soldiers sometimes too smart, too ambitious or too curious for their own good. The problem arises when she and the joint chiefs find a man digging at the proud feet of their Trojan horse, a Delta operative, twenty-six years old but already decades of soldiering written in his bones. He’s an orphan and joined the army as soon as he thought he could pass for older.

Through the hail of bullets and exploding mines, he unfortunately had enough brains left to ask— _what the fuck is going on?_

The consensus is termination.

She has no choice.

The Americans express a passing regret from sacrificing one of their best and brightest but a soldier is worthless if he cannot come to heel. Like a dog that has bitten a child, they want to put him down as cleanly and as quietly as possible.

Eleanor could have given the order, could have convinced a number of officers that he was a traitor and a spy for the enemy. She could have had him hauled away, put inside the deepest pockets of the earth and made sure he would never speak again. But the photo in her hands looks like the image of a promise never filled and a son she gave away because she couldn’t stand to see him raised by another.

She is being unreasonable, what she is considering is insane. The night before he is due to ship out for his suicide mission, she hides two kilos of cocaine in his lockers.

+++

Damien Scott disappears for a while, surfacing when the CIA needs someone to do their dirty work or the kindred soul he found in an ex-SAS John Porter coaxes him out of hiding long enough to get him properly pissed.

But Damien Scott hardly made a reliable dog. He slipped his leash four years ago following an operation that resulted in the death of a civilian boy. The CIA didn’t care at all but obviously, it left a lingering impact. Stonebridge finds him in Kuala Lumpar, getting by on winnings from cage matches. It is a vagrant existence, always looking over one shoulder to see that he is not followed.

After what she did to him, closing his files would have been kindness. Damien Scott has no real enemies, but he does have people who want him for his skills. Section twenty is merely one in a long line. It’s insanity, in the past, dead and buried. This isn’t an attempt at making up for every single birthday she’s missed since his first. If her superiors caught wind as to what she is doing, they’ll both be brought up on charges.

For the third time, she upends him from his comfortable niche in the world.

John Porter dies on screen.

She knows she has him.

**Author's Note:**

> I always thought Colonel Grant and Damien Scott had a thing for each other. Pseudo-sexual, charged not-really, trying-to-figure-each-other, out kind of thing. I just had to get this out I guess.


End file.
